Activist Calls For A 3-way Division Of Italy

ROME — All of Italy will be divided into three parts if Umberto Bossi has his way.

By Monday, within 48 hours of the proposal by Bossi, leader of the division-minded Northern League, Italy was up in arms.

The league's latter-day Caesar envisions Italy of the 21st Century as a Swiss-style federation comprising the states of Padania in the north, Etruria in the center and Mezzogiorno in the south.

Each would have its own government and levy its own taxes.

What Italian patriots joined together in 1870 to form the united Italy of the risorgimento, Bossi seeks to sunder.

"Federalism is the only way Italy can stay united," Bossi told a party congress in the northern business capital of Milan.

President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro branded Bossi's sweeping statement as nothing more than "an exhibition of egotism."

Speaking Monday nearer the other end of Italy, in the southern city of Naples that was scorned by Bossi, Scalfaro warned that a divided Italy would have no future in a united Europe.

"Don't meddle with national unity," he said.

Senate President Giovanni Spadolini, a historian of Italian unity, labeled the Bossi plan "a grave and irreparable cultural error deprived of any roots in the past and with upsetting consequences for the political panorama of the future."

Bossi's No. 1 rival, Achille Occhetto, leader of the ex-communist Democratic Party of the Left, said the plan "is, in reality, an inexorable process of secession."

"It smacks of ignorance and megalomania," La Stampa of Turin cautioned readers. "It conjures up visions of artifical territorial divisions like those imposed by colonial powers in Africa."

In Milan, Bossi's home territory, the conservative newspaper Il Giornale cast an equally jaundiced eye at plans for a federated future.

"This will solve none of the country's problems and only bring it many new ones," the paper said. For one thing, it noted the prohibitive cost of creating three autonomous states from one heavily indebted republic.

The Northern League has been talking about making the north autonomous from the rest of Italy since it came into being less than a decade ago. Its thesis is that Rome and points south are corrupt and wasteful, and only cramp the style of the rich, industrial north.

By focusing on Italy's current political corruption scandal, which appears to prove its point, the league has risen from a regional protest movement to a powerful force on the national scene.

The league is known as the carroccio for the ox-drawn chariot that carried the altars and colors of medieval Italian republics and served as their rallying points in battle.

The league has antagonized the Catholic Church, impugned the independence of the army and provoked charges of slander from President Scalfaro. But it has rolled on unscathed.

The Northern League suffered its first setbacks only this month. First, leftist candidates backed by Occhetto's ex-communists won mayoral elections Dec. 5 in Venice, Genoa and Trieste. Then, last week, Alessandro Patelli, an ex-plumber who is the league's former treasurer and is now national organizer, admitted to Milan magistrates leading the "Clean Hands" investigation that he too had pocketed a bribe.